The AOA/NZOA Trans-Tasman Fellowship is an excellent opportunity to see and hear what our brothers and sisters across the ditch are seeing as challenges to their practice. Unsurprisingly, they face many of the same challenges we do here in Australia!
Attending the NZOA Meeting held in the pleasant coastal town of New Plymouth was a great experience. The short but focused meeting was themed around robotics and computer navigation, and how these technologies are impacting orthopaedic practice. In summary, just as discussed at the AOA ASM in Brisbane, these technologies are additive tools and not necessarily the profound change to practice as they are often marketed.
As a surgeon who has a keen interest in knee surgery, it was informative to hear the update in the NZ ACL registry. Our NZ colleagues continue to have good evidence to support the use of the stiffer bone-patellar tendon-bone graft as a good choice for our younger, more high-risk patients. It was also interesting to hear how the increase in quads tendon graft and concomitant lateral extra-articular procedures are increasing in their Registry.
Another interesting fact was how the impact of COVID restrictions and limitations are still impacting waiting lists, in particular on the South Island, and how these changes affect training and the provision of service.
I was interested to see the NZOA commencing the implementation of competency-based training. I was impressed by their addition of a time-based component to the training program which means in NZ, the minimum training time remains five years, which fits into the service component of training jobs that meet the contracts for the trainees within their training hospital districts.
The quality of the registrar presentations was of high standard. We are constantly impressed by the standard of research we see from our trainees in Australia, and unsurprisingly our future colleagues in NZ are similarly presenting excellent research with conclusions that are impacting their patients in their hospital systems.
The final point from the NZOA ASM was the quality of the international faculty. We are of course biased, in Australia by the quality of data that comes from the AOANJRR, while Prof Paul Smith’s presentation was well received. The other international speakers were Prof Sebastien Lustig (France), Dr Greg Poulter (US), and Dr Martin Roche (US). All are early adopters of robotics, and they all presented objective and impressive data and experiences that helped provide practical points in the application of navigation and robotics into practice.
In summary, the AOA/NZOA Trans-Tasman Fellowship is an excellent opportunity to attend a high-quality, short and sharp meeting, by a group of colleagues who share a very similar practice and share the same challenges we see on our side of the Tasman.